The 163rd RIHN seminar

Date: September 18th, 2018 (Tuesday) 13:00 - 14:30
Place: Seminar Rooms 3 & 4, RIHN ( → Access)
Lecturer: Dr. Stephane Grumbach, an invited scholar from Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), France
Title: Humanity, nature, and our digital future
Is the digital revolution a mere consequence of global warming
Abstract:

The relationship between humanity and nature attracts an increasing attention due to worsening ecosystemic conditions, which might force human societies not only to adapt to a less favorable environment, but also to try to mitigate the current evolution as much as possible. Such adaptation requires political transformations, that are at this stage hardly predictable.

On the other hand, the world is going through a massive transformation with the advent of global digital services. Their actors reach essentially all humans, undermine the most basic political concepts, such as State sovereignty, blur the distinction between peace and war, and at the same time give rise to new approaches for sharing resources. The two transformations, digital and climate, might occur together by accident, but the striking similarities between them invites to revisit their contemporaneity.

The digital is the mean towards the mastery of information, the capacity to remotely control humans and ecosystems using automated systems. I will show some attempts to establish cartographies of information flows, and explain some of the laws that apply to information systems, that underly social and political constructions.

Contact: RIHN Center: OTOGAWA E-mail
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